I just bought Oblivion yesterday (collector's edition because I'm a consumer whore). I was messing around with it the other night and man is it cool, such a huge improvement over Morrowind.

Anyway, what are the essential mods for the game? I'd like to keep it mostly stock in terms of items and stuff like that, but something to clean up the muddy faces would be nice (there's a ton of face mods out there, which is best). Also I'd like to try something to increase the texture detail of distant areas, but again I'm not sure what to get. Anything else beyond that stuff?

Tessources is your friend. You'll want to search there for the Landscape textures (that should find it easy enough), the improved landscape normal maps from better landscape shadows in the distance to get rid of the nasty blocky look of them. I highly recommend also searching for the Advanced Water mod. I'd give the link but just don't have them bookmarked cause I searched em out and downloaded them, never bothering to bookmark em cause I archived them on a network drive after downloading and just didn't worry about it.

Another very good mod to add flavor and allow you to build a party of adventurers is Toaster Says Share, also found on tessource. This one made the game interesting enough for a THIRD run thru it now.

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?CIID=36919 has some must-have and good to have mods. I use the texture replacements mod and a slower leveling mod. Personally, I could not do without the Saddlebags mod and the Petshop mod has made this game a lot more enjoyable.

Depends. Your 7900GT should handle either the distance landscape improved textures with improved normal maps and HDR, or the close in improved landscape textures with HDR and be able to play most of the time at 1280x1024 with 16x AF. But don't try to use both the improved distance and the improved close in together with HDR unless you fancy 800x600 for smooth gameplay. Your improved clock speeds and extra 4 pipes should allow you to not have to do like I do and drop to 1024x768 during large scale battles with alot of NPCs on screen if you stick to the above advice.

No fps hit with them at all or very small 1-5fps and like eveyone said a must download for oblivion.

From what I read oblivion has something like 800/600 res textures off at the distance beacuse of the limits on the xbox360 if they changed them on the pc people would complain that the pc is better or something like that.. So everyone gets the [email protected] textures

Depends. Your 7900GT should handle either the distance landscape improved textures with improved normal maps and HDR, or the close in improved landscape textures with HDR and be able to play most of the time at 1280x1024 with 16x AF. But don't try to use both the improved distance and the improved close in together with HDR unless you fancy 800x600 for smooth gameplay. Your improved clock speeds and extra 4 pipes should allow you to not have to do like I do and drop to 1024x768 during large scale battles with alot of NPCs on screen if you stick to the above advice.

I don't mind the up close textures, just the distance ones. Nor do I really have a problem with their normal maps. But the original distance textures are quite ugly, so I will definitely use upgraded ones then if the performance will be ok.